On April 29, Microsoft used its FY26 Q3 earnings call to answer its critics with hard numbers: more than 20 million paid enterprise Copilot seats, per-user query volume up nearly 20% quarter over quarter, and an AI business running at an annual revenue rate above $37 billion, up 123% year over year. On the same call, CEO Satya Nadella laid out the revised OpenAI agreement for the first time in detail — royalty-free access to OpenAI’s frontier-model IP through 2032 — and said Microsoft “fully plan[s] to exploit it.”
The two stories only make sense together. For the past quarter the market kept arguing about two things: is anyone actually using Copilot, and what does Microsoft have left after losing exclusive access to OpenAI? With seat counts, engagement metrics, and IP terms, Microsoft answered both in one sitting.
Breaking Down the 20 Million Seats
The numbers Nadella disclosed were more layered than the headline. The count of companies buying 50,000-plus seats has quadrupled. Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche each hold more than 90,000 seats. And the Accenture agreement announced April 27 brings in over 740,000 seats at once — what Nadella called Microsoft’s “largest Copilot win to date.” Copilot has clearly moved past departmental pilots into whole-company procurement at global enterprises.
The Usage Debate: A Daily Habit Like Outlook
The persistent knock on Copilot has been “sold but unused.” Microsoft’s rebuttal this quarter was behavioral data: queries per user grew nearly 20% quarter over quarter, and Nadella said weekly engagement is now at the same level as Outlook email — “a daily habit of intense usage,” in his words.
Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss, on the call, was blunt: the Microsoft 365 Copilot numbers are “super impressive and I think way ahead of most people’s expectations.”
Agent Mode Goes Default, Multi-Model Routing
On the product side, the week before earnings, agent mode became the default experience in Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and the agentic capabilities that complete multistep work inside documents went generally available on April 22. Nadella framed it simply: “You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot.”
The model layer matters more. Copilot is multi-model by default, selecting models through what Nadella called “intelligent auto routing” — it is not tethered to OpenAI, and Microsoft 365 already supports Anthropic’s Claude. Nadella claimed “the broadest selection of models of any hyperscaler,” with over 10,000 customers having used more than one model.
The New OpenAI Deal: Royalty-Free IP Through 2032
The other focus of the call was the revised OpenAI agreement. Its core terms: exclusivity is over, but Microsoft keeps access to OpenAI’s IP — its models and agent products — and no longer has to pay OpenAI for it, effectively royalty-free through 2032. OpenAI, for its part, has committed to buying more than $250 billion of Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft holds roughly 27% equity in OpenAI. Nadella did not mince words: “We have a frontier model, with all the IP rights… all the way to ’32 and we fully plan to exploit it.”
The backdrop: once the deal was finalized, OpenAI immediately launched exclusive products with Amazon, analysts speculated Microsoft had lost its AI edge, and the stock took the hit. This quarter’s $37 billion AI run rate was the last full quarter under the old agreement — the financial shape of the new one starts showing up next quarter.
What It Means for Enterprise AI Buying
Three takeaways. First, office AI procurement is shifting from seat-by-seat pilots to enterprise-wide contracts — Accenture’s 740,000 seats is the clearest signal yet. Second, the “is anyone using it” question is moving from promises to measurable behavioral data; buying decisions will increasingly hinge on engagement metrics, not license counts. Third, multi-vendor model routing is now table stakes for the big platforms — when Copilot runs OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft’s own models side by side, the thing to engineer is your workload-routing strategy, not a bet on a single model provider.
Sources
- Microsoft says it has over 20M paid Copilot users, and they really are using it — TechCrunch
- Satya Nadella says he’s ready to ‘exploit’ the new OpenAI deal — TechCrunch
- Microsoft (MSFT) Q3 earnings report 2026 — CNBC
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.